How has postmodernism effected society, culture and design?

[fashion.student13]

Anyone know where I would begin in researching and discussing this? I have looked on the internet and been to the library but I dont understand fully what postmodernism is so im unsure how to go about answering the question.. anyone able to help?

[staisil]

In architecture, art, music and literature, postmodernism is a name for many stylistic reactions to, and developments from, modernism. Postmodern style is often characterized by eclecticism, digression, collage, pastiche, and irony. Some artistic movements commonly called postmodern are pop art, architectural deconstructivism, magical realism in literature, maximalism, and neo-romanticism. Postmodern theorists see postmodern art as a conflation or reversal of well-established modernist systems, such as the roles of artist versus audience, seriousness versus play, or high culture versus kitsch.

In sociology, postmodernism is described as being the result of economic, cultural and demographic changes, related terms in this context include postindustrial society, Late capitalism, and it is attributed to factors the rise of the service economy, the importance of the mass media and the rise of an increasingly interdependent world economy. (See also Postmodern, Information age, Globalization, Global village, Media theory).

As a cultural movement, postmodernism is an aspect of postmodernity, which is broadly defined as the condition of Western society after modernity. The adjective postmodern can refer to aspects of either postmodernism or postmodernity. According to postmodern theorist Jean-François Lyotard, postmodernity is characterized as an "incredulity toward metanarratives", meaning that in the era of postmodern culture, people have lost faith in grand, universal stories, and have instead begun to organize their cultural life around a variety of more local and subcultural myths and stories. See La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir (The Post Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge) in 1979, and the results of acceptance of postmodernism is the view that different realms of discourse are incomensurable and incapable of judging the results of other discourse, a conclusion he drew in La Differend (1983).

In philosophy, where the term is extensively used, it applies to movements that include post-structuralism, deconstruction, multiculturalism, gender studies and literary theory, sometimes called simply "theory". It emerged beginning in the 1950's as a critique of doctrines such as positivism and emphasizes the importance of power relationships, personalization and discourse in the "construction" of truth and world views. In this context it has been used by many critical theorists to assert that postmodernism is a break with the artistic and philosophical tradition of the Enlightenment, which they characterize as a quest for an ever-grander and more universal system of aesthetics, ethics, and knowledge. They present postmodernism as a radical criticism of Western philosophy. Postmodern philosophy draws on a number of approaches to criticize Western thought, including historicism, and psychoanalytic theory.

The term postmodernism is also used in a broader pejorative sense to describe attitudes, sometimes part of the general culture, and sometimes specifically aimed at postmodern critical theory, perceived as relativist, nihilist, counter-Enlightenment or antimodern, particularly in relationship to critiques of rationalism, universalism, or science. It is also sometimes used to describe social changes which are held to be antithetical to traditional systems of morality, particularly by evangelical Christians.